A Cold Day in Hell (30 page)

Although Mackenzie gave Lawton a stern dressing-down for striking a soldier, the colonel did nothing more in the way of punishment. As much as Smith had admired Mackenzie before, to him it seemed the man was really no different from all the other officers who either abused their men, or allowed the abuse by other officers to go on without proper punishment.

“Don’t you see? The colonel can’t bust Lawton down and order him to stay at Fetterman,” said another of Mackenzie’s orderlies. “He needs the lieutenant too damned bad—”

“I don’t give a damn,” Smith argued in a hushed voice. “What Mackenzie needs is to show his soldiers that fair is fair.”

Far up the bluff on Fort Fetterman’s parade that Tuesday morning, the fourteenth of November, a trumpet blared its shrill cry of “Stable Call” on the cold, brittle air:

“Ain’t it the truth, Soul!” Smith groaned, mimicking again the big Irish sergeant’s brogue. “Ain’t it the truth!”

The cavalry and Indian scouts had been camped down there, already across the North Platte, with a toehold at the edge of enemy territory. Every one of the six days they waited there after marching north from Laramie, the sky had seemed to lower that much more, spitting cruel, sharp-edged ice crystals out of the belly of those clouds. While the cold Canadian winds came sweeping out of the north, the troops sat out their boredom.

Each having a winter campaign of his own under his belt, both Crook and Mackenzie understood the importance of equipping their men properly for the task at hand. Sheridan had promised them that the men of the Powder River Expedition would want for nothing. For once that was a promise kept.

Back at Laramie they had taken on their heavy underclothing, fur caps, wool gloves—since Crook was most unsatisfied with the poor quality of the horsehide gauntlets used on the March campaign—in addition to the normal issue of wool leggings, arctic overshoes or felt liners for their boots, along with two blankets apiece. That winter equipage would get a true test, for in the last two days the temperature had not once risen above zero.

There was an A-tent assigned to every four men. The soldiers pitched these so that two tents faced each other, a lightweight Sibley stove then placed in the narrow opening and the flaps of the two tents then pinned together to seal in the modest warmth. Outside each tent stood piles of sagebrush and grease-wood stacked taller than the tents themselves. Some of the officers sported sealskin hats and long underwear made from perforated buckskin, pulling over it all a heavy overcoat with fur collars and cuffs.

Personal belongings were crated, marked, and left in the custody of the post quartermaster. Mackenzie had them down to fighting trim, ready to be off in as light a marching order as Crook could afford as they stared into the teeth of a brutal winter
storm already working on its second wind. Each cavalry company would carry two hundred rounds of ammunition for each man, while in the wagons were freighted an additional three hundred more per soldier.

Last night at nine
P.M
. Mackenzie had come back from a card game and a conference with Crook and infantry commander Dodge. All evening it had been trying to snow, when the sky suddenly cleared and the bottom went out of the thermometers.

“We’re going at dawn,” Mackenzie announced to his orderlies as he stomped up through the fresh snow. “See that the company commanders are informed.”

Then the mercurial colonel disappeared into his tent for the rest of what was left of that horrid night.

T
he last of Dodge’s infantry was finally ferried across the North Platte that Tuesday morning in the overloaded wagons easing down the ice-coated banks, the teamsters doing their best to dodge the floating ice that bobbed along the surface of the swift and swirling river some fifty yards wide at the ford, each cake of the ice thrown against the ferry’s sideboards with a resounding and forceful collision.

Even Richard I. Dodge had confided to his personal diary, “The river is my terror.”

Almost as much as he wanted to keep his foot soldiers warm and dry, the colonel had itched to get a leap on the younger Mackenzie—but already the cavalry was moving away into the sere hills streaked with snow. Dodge didn’t have the last of his men across and on their way until 11:30
A.M
. At stake each day in this unspoken race between foot and horse would be the best camping spots come sundown. Being second to get away from Fetterman put Dodge in a foul humor that would last for the next two days.

After days of intermittent snow, the sun was out that morning, hung in the sky like a pale, pewter glob behind the thin clouds. The temperature hovered at fourteen below zero.

To Seamus it didn’t seem it could get any colder as he mounted up, tucked the tail of his long mackinaw about his legs, and set out with some of the other scouts, waving farewell to Kid Slaymaker and those of his whores still up after the expedition’s last carouse before plunging into the Indian country.

A little west of north. Into the Powder River country searching out the Hunkpatila. The Crazy Horse people.

Donegan knew it was going to get a hell of a lot colder before he could once more hold Samantha in his arms. Before he would look into the face of his son and give the child a name.

Far in the advance he could see the dark column slowly snaking up what had become a familiar road that would lead them to old Fort Reno, like a writhing animal twisting across the white, endless landscape. On and on the bare hills and knolls and ridges lay tumbled against one another, each new one as devoid of brush and trees as the last, stretching into the gray horizon. For all any of them might know, Seamus thought as he pulled the wool muffler up to cover his mouth and nose, they could be marching across the austere, inhospitable surface of the moon.

Ahead of him and behind as well stretched Crook’s Powder River Expedition, perhaps the best prepared and equipped force ever to plunge into this forbidding wilderness. Especially at this season. It made quite a sight: far out on each flank the hundreds of Indian auxiliaries, the neat column of infantry, ahead of them the wagon train and Tom Moore’s four hundred mules, then the white scouts riding with Crook’s headquarters group, and in the lead marched Mackenzie’s cavalry.

As the day aged, the weather warmed too much to make for
good marching. The wind had piled the snow too deep at the sides of ridges and hillocks for easy passage, while the sun continued to relentlessly turn the snow to slush in open places, making for treacherous footing for the infantry following in the wake of all those wagons sliding this way and that as the drivers barked and cajoled, whipped and cursed their teams.

Dodge halted his infantry at the camping ground on Sage Creek after slogging eleven grueling miles. Mackenzie and the teamsters were obliged to push on another four miles before they could find sufficient water in Sage Creek for their animals—what there was had collected in ice-covered pools of brackish, soap-tinged water. As soon as the horses were unsaddled, the men spread out to scare up what they could of firewood. All they found was the smoky greasewood. Nor was there much in the way of grass for the animals. Fortunately, Crook had freighted both firewood and forage.

Shortly after taking up the march the morning of the fifteenth, some of the Pawnee discovered the tracks of three horses. Due to the condition of the ground, it proved difficult to determine if the animals wore iron shoes or not—so the trackers put their noses to the trail and took off at a lope.

“Cant help but think we’re being watched by Crazy Horse’s scouts,” Crook mused that afternoon as they kept an eye on the horizon, watching for the return of those Pawnee.

In the afternoon two of the soldiers riding on the right flank were run in by four Indians, who gave the pair quite a fright with all their whooping and gunfire, but it wasn’t until after the column made camp on the South Fork of the Cheyenne River, having put fifteen hard miles behind them, that the trackers returned to report that the trio of riders they had trailed all day had turned out to be white men.

“Miners, I’d wager,” Seamus declared.

“More’n likely horse thieves,” Dick Closter argued. The white-bearded packer spat a stream of brown tobacco juice out of the side of his mouth as he knelt to stir some beans in a blackened pot that steamed fragrantly, then smeared some of the brown dribble ever deeper into his snowy whiskers.

That night the entire command—cavalry, infantry, wagon and mule train, along with the Indian auxiliaries—all camped together for the first time, spread out along the Cheyenne where they could find enough room to graze the animals and throw down their bedrolls against the dropping temperatures as the stars winked into sight, the sheer and utter blackness of that clear
winter sky sucking every last gesture of warmth from the heated breast of the earth.

Each night Seamus did as most of the others, bunking in with another man to share their blankets and body heat, after spreading their saddle blankets over “mattresses” fashioned from what dried grass and sagebrush they could gather to insulate them from the frozen ground.

At first light the column moved out again on the sixteenth, with Mackenzie’s cavalry once more beating the fuming Dodge onto the trail the horses churned into a sodden mush for the foot-sloggers. Less than an hour after starting, all hands were halted and turned out to get the wagons and ambulances hauled up an especially bad stretch of the Reno Road, where the narrow iron tires skidded out of control on the icy prairie, unable to gain any purchase. Grunting and cursing side by side with the teams, muscling the laden wagons up a foot at a time by rope, the men finally reached the top of the long rise where they could at last gaze at the distant horizon, north by east at the hulking mounds of the Pumpkin Buttes. For the rest of the day most of the column was in plain sight of the rest of the outfit, even though it was strung out for at least five miles or more.

“Make no mistake about it,” the old mule-whacker told Donegan that night at camp after another eighteen exhausting miles, “we’re in Injun country now, sonny. How’s your belly?”

“Just a touch of the bad water, Dick,” Seamus replied. He lay by the fire, an arm slung over his eyes, feeling the rumble of that dysentery bubble through his system. “I’ll be fine by morning.”

Donegan wasn’t alone. Almost half the command suffered diarrhea to one degree or another already, forced to drink from the mineral-laced streams. The horses fared no better, many of them suffering the same symptoms, which made for a messy stretch of trail for the infantry forced to plod along behind them.

Seamus slept fitfully that night as the sky closed down upon them, dreaming of holding Sam again, of clutching his son to his breast, smelling the babe’s breath after it had suckled Sam’s warm milk.

Dear God in heaven—make this a swift strike. Keep your hand at my shoulder as you have always done, I pray. For their sake … for their sake and not for mine.

That night of the sixteenth as William Earl Smith worked at the mess fire with two other orderlies, a courier rode in from Fetterman carrying parcels bursting with mail for the men. All
those smoky, glowing fires fed with greasewood helped to hold back the gloom as men read one another their news from the States, greetings from loved ones back East, or clippings from newspapers many weeks old. Spirits ran high, despite the plummeting temperatures as the wind quartered out of the north, rank with the smell of snow in the air.